FORGET THE PAST: THE QUICKEST PATH TO SOCIETAL SUICIDE

     Walt Disney famously stated that we must always have one foot firmly planted in the past and one in the future.  Why is it necessary to to bother with the past?  It could be that in order to know where you are going, you must know where you came from.  In his article, Questions That Will Not Go Away: Some Remarks on Long-Term Trends in Architecture and Their Impact on Architectural Education, N. John Habraken makes the argument that the past in architecture must be abandoned to the present needs of those whom architecture serves.  While a strong element of truth exists within the sentiment, I would argue that such a desire is misplaced and downright dangerous.  Dangerous to the level of possible extinction.  The desires of the present must never trump the truths of the past for the necessary preservation of the future. 

Let us imagine for a second a world in which all the lessons learned yesterday were forgotten or abandoned predicated on the intellectual superiority of the present.  “We aren’t cave men anymore”, an academic may proclaim.  “Let us not go back to the dark ages”, another might postulate.  Further still, one might point out the backward thinking towards equality of the sexes during the renaissance.  But let us not forget that the caveman brought us fire and with it, the ability to purify food and water.  Have you ever made fire from nothing? That the so called dark ages brought us the rose window of Notre Dame.  (With the help of DeWalt power tools, we can barely assemble our Walmarts) And the the renaissance the scientific method and the sovereignty of the individual. (How many of us are using ChatGPT to write for us now?) My point being that just because it was invented in the past doesn’t mean they were less capable or intelligent than us today.  Let us not throw out the wheel 

The same should be said for architecture.  Yes, the way that people live in 2023 is different from the way people lived in 1500.  Yes, technology has provided new tools, materials, and ways of building.  Yes, the things that we value as a society are different.  But that doesn’t change our past or the lessons hard won.  We still eat, drink and breathe the same air.  We still love, hate, drink, have sex and value our families.  People still travel from all over the world to walk the streets of Rome, listen to world class singers, and buy works of art.  Humans have changed, but human nature has not.  Some things are older than recorded history, like the dominance hierarchy found within lobsters from which we evolved millions of years ago.  You don’t mess with evolution.  You don’t get to rewrite a millennium of human history because the style of today despises the past.  Architecture must live in the present, cognizant of the past with an eye towards the future.  Anything else is suicide.